I’ve fallen into a pattern of doing a speed run on Friday morning and going straight to Pilates. Well, technically I’ve done it twice but I really want it to be a pattern so I’m telling myself that it already is! The pilates class has a very conveniently located old airfield behind it (pictured) which is perfect for intervals. Today, I even used some of the old markings on the tarmac for my starting line. At one point, I was visualising myself running alongside planes coming in to land, Tom Cruise on motorbike in Top Gun style. Whatever gets you through, hey!
This morning’s run what “Sneaky Speed” and I remember finding it tough when I did it about a year ago. Warm up first. Then intervals: 90 seconds 7/10 effort followed by three 45 second intervals at 9/10 repeated three times with a minute between each interval. It’s relentless!
My warm up jog was uneventful. A nice, gentle five minutes alone before starting the podcast, then five more with Coach Blue to take me beyond the toxic ten. This ended very nicely at a bench where I paused and stretched. A few funny looks from dog walkers but I don’t mind too much. Time to start.
The first interval was really tough! Coach Blue warned me I was likely to go too fast and I think I did! 90 seconds felt like an extremely long time. During the walk break, I remembered that I’d done exactly the same thing last time round. Now at the other end of the runway, I found another suitable starting like. This one was lettering on the ground which said “No motorcycles” which I suspect wasn’t original airfield road marking! I was looking forward to this interval but 45 seconds still felt like a really long time at the harder effort. 30 seconds in my brain was yelling at me to slow down but I focussed on trying my best to keep to the required effort. The great thing about having a full minute recovery walk is that you’ve got a lot of time for analysing how it’s going. I decided to pay attention to exactly when that voice kept kicking in. When you’ve got twelve intervals in total, it’s a good time to try that sort of thing! Interestingly, for the whole speed run, including the longer intervals, consistently at thirty seconds I got a “please stop!!” message. I’ve been reading about responding calmly to those voices instead of overreacting (Steve Magness-Do Hard Things is a brilliant book). Quick systems check and I made a reasoned decision about whether I need to slow down-I never needed to. Treating that voice as a message I could choose to listen to or not was really helpful in keeping pushing where I was supposed to.
This was one tough run. Those intervals just kept on coming and coming, and throwing in a longer one every fourth one was brutal, even if it was at a lower effort. Mentally, it was as much of a challenge as physical. After the first set of four, I thought there was no way I’d make it to the end and decided that I was just going to do what I could and celebrate that. That helped me feel more in control and actually made it less likely I’d stop the run early.
There was a comedy comment from Coach Blue who noted that we were either hammering the speed run or nailing it, so we should think about whether we were a hammer or a nail! I was hoping to come up with a comedy answer but at that point, I was just hanging on for dear life so maybe I was neither!!
I was so glad this run ended. It was really hard but in a really good way. I feel like I really challenged how mentally tough I was today and I got through. I was super pleased to look back at my stats from last time and compare with today. Everything single interval was faster today, even though I didn’t feel like it.
I’d definitely recommend this run but go into it knowing it’ll be a challenge. Challenges are there to show us how strong we are though and I’m feeling like I could take on the world right now!
NRC Intervals 😰😰😰
Rainy intervals
